Hacker News: dopu

New comment by dopu in "Lenses in Julia"

dopu — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 13:48:25 +0000

Is set basically syntactic sugar for deepcopying a struct, mutating the specified field, and then returning that deepcopy? Seems like it could be quite slow.

New comment by dopu in "Making video games (without an engine) in 2025"

dopu — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:14:44 +0000

I’m not doubting you, but the vast majority of ideas people have for games are largely derivative and could quite easily be implemented in Unity.

New comment by dopu in "The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet"

dopu — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:36:38 +0000

There is an underlying precarity in the academy that is so deep it almost feels like a natural part of science. This is part of what makes reform so difficult. Early on, rocking the boat feels like career suicide. Later on, if you are lucky enough to become established, you are much less likely to feel like deep reform is necessary: after all, the system benefited you. And even then, the precarity doesn't go away. You still compete for grants like everyone else, and your trainees are attempting to become established. Why should they be the ones to shoulder the risk of, e.g., ignoring the glam journals and exclusively putting out preprints?

New comment by dopu in "The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet"

dopu — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:26:55 +0000

It seems to me that something like eLife's model is the best solution to this [0]: you still have a minimal amount of curation, but generally if a paper is written well enough and within the field it won't be desk rejected. Then, it gets published on the site and sent off for peer review. Peer reviewers assess how sound the paper is and pass a judgement which readers can view, as well as provide some recommendations to the authors make it stronger. The authors can then either revise the paper, or do nothing at all. In either case, papers don't languish in reviewer hell and the larger scientific community gets to see it.

[0] https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/66d43597/elife-s-new-...

New comment by dopu in "Window-Switcher: Alt+(backtick) same-app window switching for Windows 10/11"

dopu — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 04:07:03 +0000

This behavior and macOS’s terrible default window management ultimately drove me back to Windows for serious work. I suppose I never fully adapted to the macOS way of doing things, but I never understood what they envisioned users were supposed to do here. Is the intended behavior that the user minimize any VSCode windows that are not currently in use?

But then what if I have multiple windows open because the other has some reference codebase? Do I keep that in a separate desktop instead? It’s just perplexing.

New comment by dopu in "My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2022)"

dopu — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 20:49:40 +0000

I've arrived at something similar after going through a lot of different solutions: Evernote, Quiver notes, Apple Notes, Logseq, Tana: now I just keep everything in one big Journal.md file in Obsidian. I added a datestamp shortcut that inserts the date as a title in "2024 February 19 (Mon)" format, and get to writing. I use subheadings sometimes if I'm writing a lot on a particular day and it gets messy, but most days it's just a hodge podge of everything, and that's fine.

It works. A big issue with computer notetaking software, I've realized, is that I was spending too much time trying to figure out where to put things: what note should this be connected to, which folder should this be in, etc. Dumping everything into a single document, under today's date, gets rid of that. The other issue this solved was that I never looked back at what I'd written previously: opening a bunch of files was too tedious to ever do unless I was explicitly looking for something. With this, I can just scroll down and see what I was doing last week, immediately.

New comment by dopu in "Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?"

dopu — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 04:46:03 +0000

I don’t disagree with you that life can seem bleak in the present, but people have brought children into the world under much harder conditions. There is something particular about post-industrialization that has caused this attitude shift.

New comment by dopu in "Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission"

dopu — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 15:16:41 +0000

I recently decided to open up Edge and see how it was, given that it is the only browser on Windows which features hardware isolation [0]. Though it seems like this feature is deprecated now.

The sheer amount of garbage I had to turn off made me give up and close it half way through. Which is a shame, because there seems to be good tech underneath all the garbage.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-...

New comment by dopu in "Eclipse: The Demo that Sold 3D to Nintendo"

dopu — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 04:22:45 +0000

There's an arcade near me that has a functioning Battlezone cabinet. The use of a periscope in combination with the 3D graphics is so genius.

New comment by dopu in "Were small-brained early humans intelligent? Row erupts over scientists’ claim"

dopu — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 23:59:03 +0000

The relevant peer-reviewed preprint, from eLife [0]. It is worth reading the peer reviews (spoiler: they're brutal) [1].

[0]: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106 [1]: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106/reviews#t...

New comment by dopu in "Going Rogue"

dopu — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 19:27:12 +0000

Have been really enjoying Brogue lately. Besides the difficult, turn-based gameplay (decision making is more cerebral than reactive), I think ASCII graphics are part of what makes these games so enrapturing. Our brains are incredible at constructing rich narratives from limited information.

New comment by dopu in "We need female mice in neuroscience research"

dopu — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 14:00:15 +0000

Yes. Say today the mouse engages in 3 behaviors (groom, walk around edge of enclosure, then dart across it) but tomorrow spends the whole day huddled in the corner (1 behavior, not exhibited yesterday). That’s sort of what they mean by within mouse variability.

New comment by dopu in "Physics and Mathematics Self-Study Project"

dopu — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 12:45:55 +0000

I agree with you about it being broken. We’re so focused on grades because they are a believed to be an important part of the credentialing process for getting jobs. An ideal learning environment would likely be something closer to Plato’s academy, imo. Probably not possible under capitalism except for the very rich with a lot of leisure time.

New comment by dopu in "Physics and Mathematics Self-Study Project"

dopu — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 23:29:46 +0000

I disagree, I think it will provide him with a great foundation for college. As great as online learning is, I don’t think it’s the same as taking a class that you go to multiple times a week and get in person feedback on. It also takes multiple passes at a given subject to properly understand it. I’m sure he’d learn many new things he didn’t quite get from his self study if he enrolled in an actual analysis course or w/e.

New comment by dopu in "Individuals who share an ideology have more similar neural representations"

dopu — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 13:58:35 +0000

I don’t know who she is, but you don’t need to be neuroscientist or a statistician to see how laughably bad that correlation claim is.

New comment by dopu in "Kagi – Paid Search Engine"

dopu — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 02:32:18 +0000

I haven't switched due to finding the $10/month subscription too steep at the moment, but I concur that the quality of search results is high. Often higher than Google actually. Sadly, pre-pending !g to general searches on DDG is practically muscle memory by now.

New comment by dopu in "Grad student unions strike deal with University of California"

dopu — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 21:46:09 +0000

Well, it’s unfortunately true. White women have by far been the greatest beneficiaries of DEI efforts. Of the POC that have benefited from these programs, many come from wealthy families. Functionally, DEI programs mostly exist to launder the reputation of universities.

New comment by dopu in "Atom was archived today"

dopu — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 16:20:57 +0000

Took about 10 minutes to set up, and it's working great. Thanks!

New comment by dopu in "Atom was archived today"

dopu — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 06:31:47 +0000

It is so noticeable how different they are in speed. I’ve worked in Sublime for many years now (and continue to for most projects) but will switch to VSCode whenever I want to hack on some Go, since the LSP stuff works so well there. I constantly find myself messing things up due to input latency.

New comment by dopu in "My bike was stolen (2017)"

dopu — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 20:00:08 +0000

What a sad human being they must be.